Christmas picture torture

If my mother or sister are reading this I'm sure you already had a good chuckle about the title. As a kid it seemed every picture of the year somehow revolved around the Christmas card picture. Sometimes the torture started early in the fall when Mom would suddenly dress us up in our warmest (and "cutest") sweaters and drag us to the nearest park, lake, farm or otherwise middle of nowhere type place. Of course, without fail if we were dressed warmly then the weather was above average warm...turtleneck sweaters in 70 degree weather ugh. There were times, however, when the year had been insanely crazy so pictures were pushed til the colder months at which time Mom would go into winter denial mode...crud I go through the same thing! When Mom's winter denial and Christmas card pictures collided we would be sitting on a beach in Maryland or Virginia in late November wearing white button downs, jeans and barefoot...freezinggggggg. Now I cannot deny that the pictures were adorable, however, I have no idea how she shifted through all of the whiny, miserable looking ones to find the perfect one fit to be sent out to family and friends.

Back when Sep and I were adorable...notice the hokie love started young:)

Some years other family members were drug along...poor cousins.

So since Mike and I have been continuing our Christmas traditions down here in Georgia we just had to do a card. The day started off with a couple of hiccups. Speed bump number 1: finding Santa hats. Wayyy more difficult than we thought, we couldn't even find them at Walmart! Good ol' Kroger pulled through for us and we nabbed the last 2 "Mike approved" Santa hats. Speed bump number 2: the weather. We crossed our fingers all the way to the lake that the skies wouldn't open up on us and we got lucky with just a few sprinkles. Speed bump number 3: this...

So yes we are in a bit of a drought down here. I didn't expect the water level to be quite this low. The posts in the ground are normally the farthest point of the swimming section! And off in the distance a bit you can see lovely construction vehicles that have apparently been pushing sand up into huge mounds on the beach. Thankfully the camera Mike got me last year is awesome and we were able to crop all the icky parts of the scenery out. In the end we got some great shots and only a couple of pouty ones from Mike. We hope everyone enjoys their Christmas cards this year:)